Happy 2015! Coming a little late to the party, am I? Well, I’ve still got a large portion of the year to make up for it. And I think this is going to be a good year for paperdolls and, hopefully, for some stories to go with them.

This dress is a princess gown I designed when I was doing my other princess gown series, but just never got around to it. I wanted to give it the time it deserved, and I think it turned out pretty well!

Merry Christmas, to those who celebrate it; happy end of 2014, to everyone else! I’ve prepared a Christmas paperdoll based on a paperdoll I drew ten years ago: Aelinora, an elvish princess who gets bored of traditional elven Christmas celebrations and sneaks off to work at Santa’s workshop. She has four outfits (the two old ones won’t fit, I’m afraid) plus a little poem. The color and black and white PDFs are available as downloads on Gumroad for $2. It’s thanks to my mom – revisiting Aelinora was her idea.

Aelinora will have a bonus dress and short story available for free — but neither are done yet, so watch this space and I will get them up soon.

I’m excited about 2015 and I hope it brings wonderful things for all of you!

I experimented with a new coloring technique with this dress, which you can see in the pink and purple part. I confess I don’t have much else to say about it — it was fun to color, that’s all! My imagination’s been going towards NaNoWriMo (just hit 20,000 words!) and my Christmas project.

As I wrote last week, I came up with a new way of doing my rhinestones, and this is the result of my experiments. To go into Photoshop talk for a moment, I like to sketch out the design on my iPad and turn it into a path, then go over it with a rhinestone brush. (That’s just a circle brush with spaces and a layer style — the same basic technique that I wrote about in my Tiny Tutorial #2 for making a basic bead brush.) I turn it into a path automatically instead of going over it with the pen tool, which would produce a much cleaner path but takes more time. What I realized is that drawing shapes, not lines, makes this work better, as well as putting those shapes on separate layers so that I can make some parts in smaller rhinestones and some parts in larger ones. There’s more experimentation to be done, but this is a good start!